Past Lives

Director: Celine Song

USA 2023 | 106 mins

Producers: David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler

Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner

Editor: Keith Fraase

Music: Christopher Bear, Daniel Rossen

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

Languages: English and Korean with English subtitles

Festivals: Sundance, Berlin, Sydney 2023

Presented in association with

Celine Song’s gorgeous, intensely bittersweet romance ruminates on the lives and loves of two childhood friends fleetingly reunited after decades apart. Don't miss this remarkable debut feature that was the talk of Sundance.

Shimmering with melancholic longing, Past Lives is a love story of self as much as one of human connection. It’s a deeply moving tale of past and future desires, romantic or otherwise, with great affection for its syncopated characters.

Inseparable classmates in late 90s Seoul, Na Young and Hae Sung are already quite sure of their feelings for one another. But when Na Young’s family abruptly emigrates to America, twelve years pass before Hae Sung, fresh off mandatory military service, is able to track down Na Young via Facebook, who now goes by Nora and is studying playwriting in New York. Skype dates trigger old memories and new sensations—filled with such tender curiosity, their long-distance interactions make us instantly forget the modern tedium of video calls—only for Nora to cut ties in order to focus on her artistic dreams.

It’s another twelve years until Hae Sung books a flight to see Nora. The days spent walking and talking around Manhattan recall the excitement of Before Sunrise’s iconic meet cute, except with a depth of feeling that’s more pensive and sensitive to the transience of the moment. A playwright herself, writer-director Song’s screenplay is a marvel of intuition in the way it holds emotional breathing space between its simple yet expressive passages of dialogue.

Although both its title and characters refer to “In Yun”—a Korean concept of fated connection between two people in a past life—Song’s film gently eschews the true love clichés of destiny and circumstance, and with it any comparisons to K-melodrama. Instead, there’s a softness to its slice-of-life exploration of migration and culture, everyday resentment and sorrow (or “Han”, another Korean concept), aspiration and expectation, and most telling of all, individuality and choice. Its final scenes, pitchperfect in their aching certainty, will have you grasping for air—and tissues, too. — Tim Wong

“It’s rare to see a film so accurately capture the type of unplaceable, digitally inflected relationships most people know on some level: heavily mediated by screens, warped by distance, shored up by some level of a digital footprint. The depth of connection not commensurate with the frequency of direct contact. A level of offline feeling that’s more soaring, bruising and flickering, than the words or drama on the page.

The film’s climax, one that should be witnessed and not spoiled, is a measured and searing acceptance of that murkiness. There was a different path, a different life, a singular connection whose formativeness rendered it irreplaceable and irradiating. It’s the type of relationship that’s hard to explain but beautiful to watch three adults handle as adults, and more than deserving of a film smart enough to earn its unsaid yearning.”

— Adrian Horton, The Guardian

“Drawing from her own experience and a keen sense of psychology, Song writes clever, contained, jewel box conversations… [but] Song doesn’t just choose her words carefully. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner can open up the city, letting a quiet ferry ride breathe deeply of the wide sky, but excels at cramped compositions. One, as Hae Sung walks into Nora and Arthur’s apartment, enhances one of the movie’s best jokes. Up-and-coming composers

Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear (of Grizzly Bear) nudge and prod our tear ducts, as if they needed it. All the sweetness and pain is there in the words and in the distance, close and far, between Hae Sung and Nora.”

— Jacob Oller, Paste Magazine